The Intuition Network, A Thinking Allowed Television Underwriter, presents the following transcript from the series Thinking Allowed, Conversations On the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery, with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove.

VISIONARY EXPERIENCE OR PSYCHOSIS with JOHN W. PERRY, M.D.

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our topic
today is visionary experience and its relationship to psychiatric labeling,
or what might commonly be thought of as madness. My guest, Dr. John Weir
Perry, is a Jungian psychotherapist, the author of numerous books and most
recently a book called The Heart of History. Welcome to the program,
John.

JOHN WEIR PERRY, M.D.: Thank you.

MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here.

PERRY: It's very good to be on this program.

MISHLOVE: In your research, in your scholarship, you're
looking at visionary experience and how it is manifested through history.
I suppose one might say that throughout history great visionaries have
been accused of being mad.

PERRY: They have. There have been many who have been actually
insane, and many who give that appearance and yet who actually were tremendously
creative and were the creators of new cultural thrusts. So it seems that
in times of culture change, that's when the visionaries come up, and they
have a task to do in that case.

MISHLOVE: It seems as if we're almost always in some form
of culture change or another.

PERRY: Yes, but then there's a different degree of it.
A rapid, acute culture change is the result of either foreign invasion
or new conditions within the culture that necessitate a whole reexamination
of the basic values and the basic outlook, the world view. So that's a
much more cataclysmic kind of change, and during such times you could say
first that the collective psyche is stirred, and visionaries are those
people who experience it more vividly and are more articulate.

MISHLOVE: What would be an example of one such person?

PERRY: Well, there are certainly many, but one right nearby
here in eastern California was one a hundred years ago, the originator
of the Ghost Dance. Now, this was a time when the Native Americans were
getting very discouraged and looking for some hope, and he was out on a
mountainside one time in a storm and saw the whole earth rolled up like
a carpet, and also saw it cleave apart, so that the known earth went down
inside this cleft. For three days there was no familiar earth. And after
three days the earth was recreated again and the Native Americans were
living with the ancestral spirits and with the Great Spirit, and had redeemed
and reformed society, a whole new start. Now that became something, the
Ghost Dance, then enacted ritually.

MISHLOVE: He communicated the vision to the other Indian
peoples who were very moved.

PERRY: Communicated it, and they recognized in it right
away the meaningfulness for them.

MISHLOVE: They went on the warpath, as I recall.

PERRY: Well, the dance spread from coast to coast, and
yes, there were a good many uprisings as a result. It did give hope for
a while. Naturally, the conditions were --

MISHLOVE: It had a catastrophic ending, that particular
story.

PERRY: It did, unfortunately. And many of these bad experiments,
you know, they're efforts to revive the culture. There was a much more
successful one in the East, the Seneca. A man named Hanson Lake was an
Iroquois-Seneca clan, and he had a visionary state in which he was sick,
and he was taken up into the heavens and walked through the Milky Way,
which was the pathway of the deceased, and he also saw the threat of the
world being destroyed. He himself went into the realm of the dead, in other
words, and he saw that if a certain light in the sky, which was a toxic
substance, was allowed to reach the earth, this was a great sickness and
the whole population of the earth would be destroyed by this. And he met
the Great Spirit and was indoctrinated; there were angels who gave him
instructions. When he came out of this, he became a very strong leader
and reformed the society, gave it a renewed vitality, and they became a
people. They had been a slum culture up to this point.

MISHLOVE: And this was as a result of a dream?

PERRY: It was a visionary state -- what looked like a
coma on the outside.

MISHLOVE: I see. So you would distinguish this from a
dream.

PERRY: I would. Often these people get actually physically
ill. He was in a coma and his whole body went cold.

MISHLOVE: Like a delirium.

PERRY: It was. He had a little hot spot left here; that
was the only place on his body that was warm. And as he began to revive
the heat spread back through his body and he was able to start to speak
again.

MISHLOVE: It sounds very much akin to what some people
would call a kundalini experience in the yoga tradition.

PERRY: It can be. A tremendous energy gets moving through
this. I think the great difference is that typically in a visionary state
of this kind, the visionary goes through a death experience and an experience
of world destruction -- perceives it, or actually is in the middle of it
-- and it's that that seems to indicate the basic reorganization of himself
and of his culture both.

MISHLOVE: Would you say, however, that Hitler was such
a person?

PERRY: Unfortunately there are many bad eggs who were
visionaries. Yes, he took a long training, of course, with peyote and a
guru.

MISHLOVE: Now this I didn't know.

PERRY: Oh yes. He went through the whole trip.

MISHLOVE: I mean, many people who are skeptics of the
whole new-age, mystical, spiritual trend these days suggest that what we're
doing is we're creating the same kind of social conditions that existed
in Germany prior to the rise of Hitler -- opening ourselves up to superstitions.

PERRY: Yes. I think the great difference, of course, is
that Hitler's beginning and his whole following were totally dedicated
to power, which is not typical of the ordinary visionary. That's a special
thing, that the visionaries have a different sort of message to give in
different eras of time. That's what my book is going to be about.

MISHLOVE: And we're certainly in a period of social transition
right now.

PERRY: That's why I'm interested in it and I'm writing
about it. And I'm particularly worried as to what we do with our visionaries
-- you know, clapping them all away in places where they're shut up in
hospitals or clinics, or medicating them, or recommending they go into
therapy and get over this state.

MISHLOVE: I mean, even the Indian leader who came up with
the Ghost Dance vision and led to the disaster for his people, he was in
touch with a certain social reality at the time which needed to be expressed
in some way.

PERRY: Oh yes, dedicated to his culture.

MISHLOVE: I guess there are those who seem to feel that
we must face the problems around us rationally, that we must not retreat
into the subconscious, into visionary experience, into escapism. You seem
to be saying just the opposite.

PERRY: And for the reason that the humanistic kind of
rational thinking -- thinking out a good program for society, good reforms
and good policies -- that comes from the top of the head. And what fails
to happen then is the stirring up of the motivations. In order for a real
change to occur there has to be a deeply motivated population, and that
means that the deep psyche has to be involved. It's there that the creative
ideas come from, in very symbolic terms at first, just images. But they
have a lot of energy in them and a lot of persuasiveness, and when people
hear a visionary leader when it's time for one of these revolutionary changes,
there is a sort of mass movement that sweeps through a population, and
an enthusiasm.

MISHLOVE: Well, do you think that some of this is why
a leader like Reagan relies to a large extent on the mythology of evangelical
Christianity and the notion of fighting the evil empire?

PERRY: It's an effort in that direction, I think totally
misguided, from my point of view, because it takes an old religious form
and tries to refurbish it in sort of modern clothes. In a special way,
I think -- I'm not talking of the churches in general here, but just of
the particular political kind of Christianity that gets to Washington --
that that's making use of an old form to give a new message, and I wouldn't
be surprised if in our time we needed a basically new mythic statement,
a different way of seeing our world.

MISHLOVE: Do you see this emerging in your own work with
people? As you work with their dreams do you see a new vision evolving?

PERRY: Yes. It depends how deeply their psyche is stirred,
whether the archetypal psyche is -- that is, the mythic psyche. The more
deeply disturbed people are, you could say, the more purely mythic the
content that comes into play. Now, the preferable thing is in ordinary
therapy to get somebody with a stirred-up psyche and you're able to assimilate
that and bring it into consciousness and understand it. And then it moves
slowly, it moves along week by week, and it takes a few years, and that
gives plenty of time to assimilate those into actual living, translate
the images into living. But in the deeply disturbed ones that are more
cataclysmic, what is commonly called a psychotic state, we prefer to call
it still a visionary state.

MISHLOVE: In other words, one of the points that you want
to make here is that we do people an injustice by labeling them as psychotic,
as mentally ill, as having a nervous breakdown.

PERRY: We do, indeed.

MISHLOVE: How would you characterize it instead?

PERRY: Well, the reason for labeling that and calling
it psychotic, calling it crazy, is that the ideation is considered bizarre
-- you know, that it's strange. Well, if you say that, it means mythic
thinking from the start of time is bizarre, because one thing that most
psychiatrists don't realize nowadays, since everybody gets medicated in
these states, is that they never hear that kind of thinking.

MISHLOVE: I suppose when one uses a label like bizarre,
it almost presumes that the everyday reality which we take for granted
is not bizarre. And that may be a form of madness.

PERRY: Yes, that's the hooker -- that there's an alternative
reality which is mythic, which has to do with a world of archetypal phenomena,
and for a person in a disturbed state, that's the real world at that particular
time. That's his reality or her reality.

MISHLOVE: And you're suggesting that that's a valid reality.

PERRY: That's a valid reality for a period of time. Here
we're talking about acute episodes of this kind, acute onsets of visionary
experience that last a few weeks. And if they're properly handled they
don't become that miserable state of low-level chronic withdrawal, the
discouraged outlook and the loss of hope.

MISHLOVE: So what you seem to be saying is when a person
begins to experience this so-called craziness, this psychotic break, the
worst thing is to try and stop it.

PERRY: That is the worst, and the second worst thing is
giving it the label that you're mentioning. When it's called crazy, that
is the moment of the person feeling crazy for the first time. I've heard
many people describe swimming around in this mythic world, in this visionary
world, and being overwhelmed and sometimes frightened, but mostly feeling
very high with it, and as soon as they're told that this is craziness and
they must be medicated and locked up, then they feel very crazy and are
crazy.

MISHLOVE: Because they buy into the social reality.

PERRY: They buy into it right away.

MISHLOVE: And the social reality is real. I mean, if people
say you're crazy --

PERRY: It's very real indeed, yes.

MISHLOVE: In the Soviet Union, if you're a political protestor,
you get labeled as crazy. And many of these people, I suppose they lose
their hold on whether they are crazy or not.

PERRY: They're very deviant, and there's a chasm between
them and the other people. So it seems that the difficulty of a psychosis
is that interface between one's state and that condition, and then their
surroundings. Because the surroundings also during the withdrawing and
the recoiling and the fear, both parties -- say in a family, both the person
who's going through this and the rest of the family -- are both withdrawing
from each other because this chasm is opening up. So then the needed thing,
rather than a diagnosis and stopping the whole thing, is a receptive, comfortable
kind of listening to it.

MISHLOVE: Although I suppose the people who are involved
in this situation want to protect themselves from the impact, from the
power of it.

PERRY: That varies. There are a great many who want to
go into it, and who feel very cheated if they're taken out of it too fast.
They feel quite angry if they are.

MISHLOVE: I don't mean the patients now, or your clients.
I mean the relatives, who feel like they want to live their normal life.

PERRY: It's very upsetting to relatives. And that is really
the reason why this has, I think, to be treated like an initiatory experience,
for instance. Typically in initiation rites the child is taken out of the
usual context to live in the bush, or wherever it is, for a time, for a
while.

MISHLOVE: With a shamanic teacher.

PERRY: With a teacher. Goes through that whole experience
of rebirth, death and rebirth, and comes back new. That has to be apart.
And I think these people have to be apart for a while.

MISHLOVE: One might even say that in that kind of a context,
the person who goes through the visionary process and heals themselves
comes out stronger, more vital, more alive, more powerful than had they
never had this so-called sickness in the first place.

PERRY: When it goes right that is the way it happens;
I wish I knew what proportion come out that way. But when it happens it's
quite dramatic. The old self really does die off, you could say; they outgrow
it. And where they had been inordinately preoccupied about prestige and
rather afraid of relationship up to this point, when they come out, the
warmth is there; the trust relationship, the warmth is there, the lovingness.
And that's really the fruit of this whole process.

MISHLOVE: People who have been through the experience
are then able perhaps to recognize and to guide others through it as well.

PERRY: Yes. We had a facility here in the city that operated
this way, and on our staff were some people who had been through it that
way; some had had other kinds of experience of death. But yes, when somebody's
been through that they have a kind of feel for the meaningfulness of it
and are able to receive it without fear, and really tune in on it.

MISHLOVE: Do you think that people, once they've had this
visionary, so-called psychotic state, and they're allowed to go through
it, are they then free from the effects of it later on? Do they have relapses?
Are they able to function?

PERRY: They are able to function very well, often. What
we found in our facility here, called Diabasis, was that the people in
this acute state, if they were received in the sort of spirit of openness
and caring and readiness to listen, all this, within two or three days
came down from being quite psychotic to being quite rational. Then the
process was still going on, but they felt more like people in therapy than
people in an insane state.

MISHLOVE: Now, there are those who say that what causes
so-called madness is a family dynamic -- that the person who is going schizophrenic,
psychotic, is doing it really to save the other members of the family.
Now what happens when this person heals themselves of that condition and
is returned to the original family environment?

PERRY: There's a lot to thrash out, and it depends very
much how the family are able to take that -- whether they are able to meet
that with the encouragement of the staff, let's say, and deal with it,
or whether they keep trying to dismiss it and put this person back into
the status of patienthood.

MISHLOVE: Family members might rather the person be drugged.

PERRY: Yes, often.

MISHLOVE: You recommend not using drugs.

PERRY: Not only I, but you know, one time I was invited
to the Stanford Research Unit, which does biochemical research on psychotic
states, and I was a little timid about this because that was the sort of
ingroup of medication treatment.

MISHLOVE: Very prestigious organization.

PERRY: Very prestigious. And when I got through, they
said -- at that particular time; I wouldn't say this year, they did in
1978 -- that this was the right way to handle first episodes, the way we
were doing, without medication. Let the person go through it, and then
if it tends to become chronic, if it goes down, sure, medicate. But I think
that is a point of view that is really totally out of acceptance right
now. There's a tremendous preoccupation, as you know, with brain chemistry
now, and assigning everything to physical causes, and as long as that's
prevailing, there's not much patience for this sort of treatment.

MISHLOVE: And yet if one looks at history, which you have,
there are many great, rational thinkers, great scientists like Newton or
Swedenborg, who were also visionaries -- who had this totally irrational,
visionary side to them, which they allowed to flower. I suppose part of
the skill is knowing how to cultivate the irrational side, the mythic side.

PERRY: It is; to translate it into the rational.

MISHLOVE: Without confronting people in a way that's going
to be offensive to them. It's more of a social skill than anything else.

PERRY: I think. A very amusing example of that, I think,
is Descartes, who said that a couple of angels revealed the new mathematic
to him. Not many years later he was saying the imagination must be absolutely,
strictly cleansed out of science -- that anything that has to do with visions
and imagination is simply not permissible in science. So he was in his
own contradiction about this.

MISHLOVE: What do you make of that?

PERRY: I think it's what you're talking about. I think
for the adaptation to society and a new trust for the new young science
like this, it had to be preserved. So to mix it up with some of the old
gobbledegook of just plain religious --

MISHLOVE: So he was politically astute in that sense.
And I suppose Newton, who was an alchemist, in much the same way sort of
cleansed his scientific writing, so that he kept these two compartments
of life separate, but both still very much alive within himself.

PERRY: Yes, and the visionary state, then, in politics
or in society, let's say, would need that also. You know, in politics there
was in China a man named Hung -- Hung Hsiu-ch'uen -- who about a hundred
and thirty years ago had a visionary experience. He was sick; the family
thought he was dying, and he had six weeks, forty days, of visionary state,
while he was in this deathlike state. And when he came out of it he was
stronger, firmer, but it wasn't for six years that he knew what to do with
this experience, in which he visited the heavens in the usual fashion and
talked to the Great Spirit, so to speak. Now, he then became aware that
this was a religious experience with a religious implication, and had a
part to play in Chinese society. So he gathered a following, he led the
Taiping Rebellion, which is the one that took over Nanking in the south,
and set up an alternative government for several years, and he almost became
emperor. So he was very successful in translating visionary states into
political form and military conquest, in that case.

MISHLOVE: But given the delicacy of our current situation
right now, the threat of nuclear warfare, it would seem to me that the
kind of visionary experience that is called for today is different than
this. We don't need another Ghost Dance or a Taiping Rebellion.

PERRY: We don't even need another cult, I guess, do we?
You know, we're sort of allergic to cults since the recent disasters with
cults. So that probably is not going to be the way, but we do have to understand
our mythic thinking, when it comes to how we use the A-bomb, or nuclear
energy in general.

MISHLOVE: It seems that what we really need at this point
is some form of global understanding, where we can live together.

PERRY: Yes. I think this is where the visionary experience
becomes relevant in politics right today -- that the inordinate fear that
we have of world destruction is an image that you see in people's dreams;
you see it in people's psychotic states, visionary states. And fundamentally,
according to the history of it, it has to do with culture change -- that
the end of the world is the end of the culture form, not the actual globe,
and that then the regeneration of the world is the regeneration of the
culture with a whole lot of new outlook, new values, new world view. And
this is what I think we're really afraid of.

MISHLOVE: But we're at a point in history now where we
can't play around the way we used to. History has changed, I think, with
the development of nuclear weapons.

PERRY: That's right. Time gets short. Something has to
really be done about this soon. And if we could translate our fear of the
nuclear winter, let's say, and destroying the world that way, into the
thing I think we're more afraid of, which is changing our cultural preferences;
if we really develop, actually, an ecological kind of society, and actually
have a different point of view toward the international world, then this
is a whole new mentality we're talking about.

MISHLOVE: You seem to be referring in this interview quite
a bit to the Native Americans. Do you see them as something of a model
for us to look toward?

PERRY: In a sense, yes I do -- in the sense that I think
we need to heed what visions are telling us. And Native Americans always
are very respectful even of what a big dream or a vision has to say to
the society. I think we need that.

MISHLOVE: Would you recommend people, for example, sharing
their dreams over breakfast?

PERRY: Yes, there's that, and like the Senoi people. But
also we're including here, I think, poets who can naturally speak out at
that level and render it to the people, and artists also can convey it.
So there are many avenues in which the visions would be appearing to people
and through which they can be expressed.

MISHLOVE: At this point in time in our culture, the visionary
side is sort of an alternative to all of these nice boxy looking buildings
that we live among -- rectangular houses.

PERRY: Yes, it's very stark, isn't it? We're in probably
the most materialistic kind of extreme that a culture could reach, and
very individualistic in the sense of people being out for themselves. So
this view of the city you're describing as stark and rectilinear is very
expressive of where we are with our rationalistic culture -- materialistic.

MISHLOVE: So what you're suggesting, John, if I can summarize,
is that part of us demands that we move away from this, that we develop
an appreciation for the mythic, that we sense that what we call madness,
what we call insane, what we call crazy, is really a healthy part of ourselves
trying to express itself. And if we can come to understand that, we can
as a society and as individuals achieve greater integration for ourselves
-- that we can move forward as a culture --

PERRY: That's it.

MISHLOVE: -- into a brave new world, so to speak.

PERRY: Yes. And if there's going to be, as you were saying
earlier, really profound change, I think it has to come right from the
depths of the psyche. That's the level that needs listening to and assimilating.

MISHLOVE: John Perry, thank you very much for being with
me. It's been a pleasure.